After all, the cop is now a FORMER DeLand police officer--he's not working as a cop anymore, and since he was a rookie, his legal costs may not have been covered by the union, so if his family needs to raise money to cover his defense, that's up to them.

The victim's family took a half-million dollar settlement with the police department (which proves nothing); but if there's a villain here, it's the medical examiner's office and the DA who declined to press charges in the case. I mean, the cop could hardly come out and say "No no, I think you should press charges against me, it was clearly a case of vehicular homicide." It's up to the DA to decide whether to press charges or not--and it's up to the medical examiner to determine how and why a person died. It was the ME's office that determined the victim didn't die by being struck by a car, which would have led the DA to decide not to file charges. Which makes zero sense, since that would mean the guy just up and died, or as we used to say DFO'd.

Cop hate may be misplaced in this one. I think what's wanted here is a double helping of lawyer and bureaucrat hate.

Why would you run from cops for not wearing a seatbelt? Why would an officer chase someone, endangering others lives, for a seat belt violation?

This is so filled with fail, and the idiot paid the ultimate price, for what, a $35 dollar ticket? Guessing he didn't have a license, and that is why he was running. Or had drugs on him. No reason to run unless something else was going on.

Kudos for the assist on the Darwin award, with the plus of getting a idiot cop off the street. Win win.

That dashcam video makes it pretty clear that this was vehicular manslaughter at the very least. I can't say with all honesty that it was intentional, though the way the officer turned the vehicle and didn't slow down is pretty damning. Yeah, the guy was dumb for running, but the burden to act responsibly is still on the officers. There was no reason for that.

The outrage over the guy's death I can understand, but what the hell difference does it make that the item raffled to raise money was a gun? Is it just the knee-jerk liberal "all guns are EEEEVIL!!" BS? If they truly wanted to go for bad taste, they would have raffled off a used police cruiser with a little front-end damage.

Guns are a great item to use for a raffle. They are fairly expensive and people tend to want to have them, so you can generally sell a lot of tickets for a decent price. The fact that you might be ideologically opposed to guns or gun ownership means precisely jack shiat.

BraveNewCheneyWorld:Are we supposed to be offended that a gun is being raffled, even though the death didn't involve a gun?

It looks like the cop intended to use his car to bump the guy, but didn't account for him tripping just before he got to him. Since I don't think cops should use their cars as taser, the cop should do time. It's unintentional, but he knew he was unnecessarily putting the man's life at great risk.

A couple things:

It sounds like we should be offended at the rather shady nature of the raffle, There is reason to doubt whether a gun is being raffled at all.

This is grade A trolling, if the AR-15 wasn't such a contentious item right now, and bound to upset and offend so many people, they probably would have pretend raffled something else.

Any cop that would argue that using a car as a weapon isn't deadly force hasn't been on the job long enough to respond to a serious auto accident. He might as well have fired "warning shots" right into the guy's back. Whether the victim deserved it or not, there is no question he used deadly force in response to someone running from a seatbelt violation.

Are we supposed to be offended that a gun is being raffled, even though the death didn't involve a gun?

It looks like the cop intended to use his car to bump the guy, but didn't account for him tripping just before he got to him. Since I don't think cops should use their cars as taser, the cop should do time. It's unintentional, but he knew he was unnecessarily putting the man's life at great risk.

You don't run from a simple seatbelt violation. Now you are fleeing a police officer. You run when where you are/what you were doing is a violation of probation, like driving on an suspended/revoked license. He might know a thing or tow about those things: http://florida.arrests.org/search.php?fname=marlon&lname=brown&fpartia l=True">http://florida.arrests.org/search.php?fname=marlon&lname=brow n&fpartia l=TrueI see 8 arrest records for the guy.

Now, this in no way justifies a cop for running him over, which is why his next of kin go $550,000 from the police. But I don't see any connection between a gun and the incident in the story and why I should be upset over it.

ReapTheChaos:Guns get raffled off all the time, there's absolutely nothing illegal about it in most states, you 'afraid of your own shadow' types need to get over yourselves.

As far as the issue with the guy who got killed, once you begin to run from the police, you open yourself up to possible harm. Accidents happen, from watching the video it looks to me like the guy slipped and fell and the cop simply could stop in time. Nobody runs from the police for a simple traffic violation, this guy was obviously guilty of something and he didn't want to be caught. I have zero sympathy for him.

Sure looks like the cop ran him over. Oh, and there are these fun tidbits:

"At best the report is inaccurate, at worst it's a blatant lie," says Brown family attorney Benjamin Crump, who also represented Trayvon Martin's family.

Complicating the case is the fact that the autopsy was actually performed by Dr. Shiping Bao - the same doctor who performed the autopsy on Trayvon Martin - but signed by Herrmann. Bao was fired from his position in the M.E.'s office in September. According to the complaint, Bao told the Brown family that he concluded the cause of death was not an "accident" but "traumatic homicide," but that he was overruled by his supervisor, Dr. Herrmann.